UConnBBall wrote on Jul 4, 2014, 14:45:GOG needs to buy Kali (http://www.kali.net/) I remember back int he day it was the place to play. Then it was The Zone till M$ closed it for no good reason. Then dumb GameSpy showed up and made the experiences worst.

I remember Kali. Was the only service that allowed early Doom connectivity remotely. Miss those days. That's a service that deserved to grow further, just for what it gave the community back then. (They probably just failed to evolve).

Scheherazade wrote on Jul 4, 2014, 14:06:Warcraft 2 had IPX multiplayer from release.I played it multiplayer over seripx on BBS' (BBS IPX emulator).

The internet was rather flaky back then, and IPX over IP wasn't too popular.Some games did it, AFAIK Mechwarrior2 did? Or maybe that was IP over dial-up. Can't remember.

-scheherazade

Yeah I recall it having IPX, just not TCP/IP, which is the only thing I had the ability to connect to. (not enough individual, personal contacts, nor the ability to meet others, where I lived/grew up). If I recall, WC2 BNE enabled connectivity to strangers. Could be wrong though.

Used to be my favorite Warcraft as well, until a close friend of mine showed me exactly how overpowered an Ogre rush was. Don't think I've played the game since!

I think in that era, it was difficult to even get TCP/IP connections in a game (Warcraft 2 didn't have one until its re-release several years later). It was probably IPX only or something. If it did have LAN that is a little surprising they'd take it out, but who knows the difficulty they faced in updating it for modern machines...

I never played the game because I was always turned off by the box art.

Quinn wrote on Jun 4, 2014, 11:25:It's a complete clusterfuck in the visuals of course. Last I've seen graphics go crazy like that -- like the textures have no clue where to latch on so instead go nuts -- was with my Voodoo 3dfx card.

That's a sign that your card is overheating. Probably not serious, but you might want to keep an eye on that.

For anyone who works in the game industry, this isn't a "really good read", it's the typical sob-story. The precedent has been set for decades that abusing developers is the status quo, and upper management has not changed an ounce since the whole practice was outed last century.

Developers need to quit jobs voluntarily, en masse, for things such as this. That's the only way it's going to change. Otherwise they are going to continue to slave away for what *seems like* large, 6-digit salaries, while executive management, investors and boards rake in the millions and then lay them off after burning them out.

The guy in this story dramatizes things well, but any developer without blinders on could drop a half-dozen or more stories like this any day of the week. It's pathetic.

China has owned us for a very long time, and they have so thoroughly rooted our networks for more than a decade that the flip of a switch is the only step remaining.

DangerDog wrote on Jun 2, 2014, 11:12:The joke is that China is taking over America by buying up one business at a time and our government is more than happy to assist them, including rewriting FDA rules to allow food to be processed in China and then sent back to the US without any need to label it as product of China. Smithfield Foods, largest pork producer in the US. Take a guess who just bought them up.

Fantaz wrote on May 29, 2014, 18:48:seems like hard times in the game industry lately...

Are you kidding me? So many people are making huge bank right now. Sales just keep going up and up. Mythic has been irrelevant for years now. It's only a surprise they weren't closed long before now.

The last two years have been an absolute nightmare for the working professionals in the industry. The only people making "huge bank" right now are the board members of a few select companies. Salaries are higher than ever for developers, but does that really matter when the expected length of your employment is 6-10 months?

BitWraith wrote on May 7, 2014, 10:43:I think they should release something like the Atari Flashback. A little nes console that has their entire nes and snes library on it or something - one that will hook up to modern tvs. I's buy one for a hundred bucks.

Seventy-fucking-five games. I don't pay any attention to this list, and this is pretty much why. I fully expect amazing games to fall through my radar. I fully expect the worthy ones to be picked up by word-of-mouth. Also: I love hyphens.

What kills me is the staying in business part. It makes me wonder if there's a use for suits in the industry after all. I can only presume that the guys holding together the business like Spark would run a more successful company dry, but it's nice to dream.

Parallax Abstraction wrote on Apr 29, 2014, 18:57:

Neilsouth wrote on Apr 29, 2014, 17:57:Awful game avoid! Not scary and extremely boring, you can finish it in an hr or two

Yep. Everything I've read about this indicates it's another Zombie Studios game: i.e. bad. I watched Giant Bomb's quick look this morning and it's just a bunch of running around while very little happens and the writing is almost comically bad. This is one of those developers like Spark Unlimited that continually cranks out mediocre to crap games and yet somehow stays in business while quality developers fold.

Seriously? I want all of you to remember the last time you were suckered-like-a-complete-bitch into buying something because the trailer looked cool. There are at least a dozen things here that fucking SCREAM by-the-book marketing presentation. How can any of you, who have been around this scene for at least 1-2 decades have ANY EXCUSE to fall for the same bullshit again and again and again.

This is literally a game from 10 years ago, where the only thing that's advanced is their editing and marketing.

(I could be wrong, but there is NOTHING here to say I'm not). Fuck I'm going to play some H&D.